What would we do without the internet? Or if I was to rephrase that question, what would the internet do without security? Would it be useful to us at all? I believe that it would still be useful, but not half as much. The internet would not be good for much more than information gathering. What I am saying is that security is what makes the internet so useful to us all. It is what allows us to use the internet to transfer important data and to accomplish important everyday tasks online.
Without security, the internet is not good for much at all. That is why one of the greatest weapons to help you protect your security online is cryptography. “Cryptography has the power to provide secure communications, protect transactions, provide powerful privacy, and validate the integrity of information.” The one problem with cryptography is that most people don’t know how to use it or work with it effectively. There are numerous users on the internet (most of the general population in my opinion) who do not ever regularly inspect cryptographic security certificates from the secured HTTPS websites they visit. When these same average users install applications, they do not ever check whether or not they are from trusted sources (although even installing apps from trusted sources is not necessarily a guarantee of their security, either). The internet is growing at a frightening pace. At this stage of development, most new users to the internet have no idea about things like security awareness or security mechanisms they can use ot protect themselves. That is why we, as computer scientists, must pay close attention to making these cryptographic exchanges of information as foolproof and user-friendly as possible.
Hey, Brian. After reading your post, I noticed that near the end of your post, you mentioned that it is up to us computer scientists to make security features more “user friendly”, and I feel that that is an important point, since if a security feature is unintuitive to a user, then they will not use it. This seems to be one of the shorter blog posts, so I do feel that a specific example would help in understanding the subject. Perhaps you could have talked about security toolbars or HTTPS. I do, however, feel that sometimes people forget that cyber-criminals can be anonymous and exploit other users more easily.
ReplyDeleteYou puts various kinds of concern on security issues when people are using internet more and more in daily life. It is very important for everyone to know how to protect their privacy when using internet, but the first step is to be aware of the potential risks, as expressed in your article. I have a little different opinions to the topic as who should pay for the responsibility of the internet security, I believe that computer scientist will definite take a very important role to bring us with more secure technique, while other organization like the government should also take responsibility to severely punish internet criminals.
ReplyDeleteHello Brian,
ReplyDeleteWhile it's true that the average user does not know many good security practices, there is some evidence that people are getting at least slightly better at keeping sensitive information secure. Thanks to all of the talk about government spying, some people who didn't think twice about internet security are becoming interested out of fear. I think that if things continue the way that they are, people will become much more aware and adopt better practices.